Walking the Chosen Road!

Do we hire employees for the company or for specific functions or for specific roles? I have seen different companies choosing different paths for itself. PnG is known for hiring for specific functions – skill expertise is what they supposedly value. We are known for hiring for the company – for a manager the question is not about “where you will fit in”, the question is rather about “how will you fit in”.

What are the consequences of choosing either of these alternate paths?

What happens when a company chooses the “we hire for the company” route? Can we say that expertise is not needed anymore in any of the roles? I feel expertise is needed but in a scenario where cross-functional assignments/movements are the norm, there must be other ways of ensuring that expertise comes in. You might need to work with “knowledge or skill” expert firms to get the expertise inside your firm. Or you might need to have strong career movement or succession processes in place. One manifestation of this might be a lengthy career planning and development phase – before someone moves into a new role in a different skill area, s/he picks up the knowledge/skill required for that role over a period of 12 months before moving into the role. This would necessarily mean that the knowledge and skill pre-requisites for a role are charted out and learning systems are in place to deliver learning content to an individual at a time and pace suited to him. Without systems and processes to ensure the availability of skill within the system, the system would be permanently hungry for expertise. You may see a situation where situations are getting adequately addressed (individuals are good at identifying problems and addressing situations through adequate solutions) but the solutions are not best-in-class or not as effective as they could have been. In such a situation the system would be in a constant state of infancy/adolescence – the wheel would be re-invented over and over again.

Let us also try to appreciate how prospective employees might evaluate such a company as an employer. If a society were to value skills and expertise, would a “general managerial” employer be highly valued in such a society? How would such a company fare in skill based societies like USA or Western Europe? If the Indian society were to become highly skill/expertise focused over the next 20 years, would such a company be able to hold on to its philosophy of valuing “general managers” only?

What happens when a company chooses the “we value expertise and skills” route? I have not experienced working for such a company but a possible drawback does occur to me:

• What about inter-group collaboration? Would people from different skills/expertise areas be able to work together? A possible answer here would be to remove individual based performance incentives and have cross –functional teams as the units of performance.

So which alternative is better? I don’t think that’s the correct question to ask.

I remember a colleague once saying “It does not whether we choose the general managerial or the expertise route. What matters is whether we have made up our minds one way or the other and have executed our intent well. Execution is what would make a difference.”

I agree! We have to choose our own roads and walk on it. Irrespective of the road we take, we would face hurdles. The challenge lies in overcoming those hurdles. At the end of the day “All roads lead to Rome”. The question is “are you willing to walk on the road you have chosen”? or “are you ok being perennially at the cross-roads debating on which is the better road to take?”

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Sourav